5.2 PTR: Spirit Beasts, Item Upgrade Hiatus, Revised T15 Set Bonuses

There are three new spirit beasts on the PTR--spectral porcupines. These pets are similar to the Firelands tames in that they spawn neutrally, are visible to anyone, can easily one shot players if not kited properly, and are invulnerable to being tamed unless they're below 20% HP. Thanks to user Ozlem for the tip!

Degu is a red porcupine that patrols to the east of Crane Wing Refuge in Krasarang Wilds.

Spirit Walk: Puts your pet in stealth mode, but slows its movement speed by 50%. The first attack from stealth receives a 20% bonus to damage. Lasts until cancelled.

News Round Up: Item Upgrades, Dailies, 5.2 PTR Class Balance

After covering Ghostcrawler's tweets about item upgrades over the past few days, we finally got a concrete explanation of what is going on with the system introduced in 5.1. Item Upgrade NPCs will be gone in 5.2 completely, but will most likely return in the non-raid Patch 5.3. The system is intended to allow players who have purchased all of their gear to burn spare currency, not confuse players and make them choose between buying new gear or upgrading old heroic gear. We'll be keeping all of our upgrade tools on Wowhead active, since previously-upgraded items will keep their stats and the system will most likely return.

It would be nice if JP and Honor upgrades could stick around though to give new players an early stat boost. Better upgrade Spear of Xuen for your alts while you can!

We also have a bunch of forum clarifications from Ghostcrawler on set bonuses and class balance on the PTR. For example, Item - Druid T15 Guardian 4P Bonus will grant 50% increase to rage generation while Enraged.

And finally, it wouldn't be a news round up with a discussion about dailies--this time from Draztal.

Click the cut to read all the Blizzard posts!

5.2 Item Upgrade System Hiatus

Bashiok

Even Ethereals need a vacation, and the item upgraders (Voidbinders), are no exception. They’re saying they need to go home to take care of business arrangements, but … I’m not convinced. I think they’re just homesick for their ‘space mummy’ families.

Ok ok, fourth wall broken, we’re actually just temporarily removing them from the game for 5.2 due to the new raid tier. The idea with the item upgrade system is that it’s a way to spend currency on upgrading items when buying new items isn’t the clear path. Either you’ve bought everything, or at least most of them, and then spend currency to get that extra *oomph*. With a new raid tier coming, we don’t want to create a trap where people are wondering what’s more lucrative: spend currency on new items, or on the new gear appearing on vendors? (Hint: It’s the new gear on vendors.) To help ensure we’re not indirectly encouraging anyone to spend their currency somewhere they probably shouldn’t, the item upgraders will be taking a break.

Right now we’re planning for them to return in 5.3, which will not have a raid tier, and offer upgrades again as people will have likely have some currency to burn. We’re not sure yet if we’ll continue this cycle of having them take a break for raid patches and then come back in non-raid patches, but we’ll continue evaluating as we go, absorb feedback, and let you know how these plans evolve.

Ghostcrawler on Class Balance and Set Bonuses

Ghostcrawler

- The Item - Paladin T15 Protection 4P Bonus counts damage after all mitigation, and does count absorbed damage.- The Item - Paladin T15 Retribution 4P Bonus set bonus has changed. It now has a chance for Hammer of the Righteous or Crusader Strike to cause your next Divine Storm to cause extra damage to your target. The idea being that you might swap from TV to DS when you get the proc, so that the RNG is something you can actually do something with rather than it just being RNG for extra damage.- Retribution now does 50% extra healing with Flash Heal. The Selfless Healer talent has been reduced to 20/40/60% bonus healing.- Sacred Shield's absorb effect is now dispellable, but the periodic effect is not.- Blinding Light has a 1.8 sec cast for Holy only. We think Holy's CC chains are too strong at the moment, but we don't think Ret or Prot need the nerf.

- The Item - Druid T15 Guardian 4P Bonus is currently a 50% increase to rage generation while Enraged.- We are going to slightly increase Resto druid healing across the board.- We still like the DR change to Cyclone, but we are going to increase its range to 30 yards, and the PvP glove bonus for Balance and Resto will be to increase Cyclone duration by 2 sec.

- Our current though on Power Word: Solace is that it will provide damage and healing for both Disc and Holy. So Holy could use it for some Atonement-like healing, as could Disc, but Disc won't double dip and shouldn't feel like it's mandatory. That could change (all of this could change) as we try it out and iterate more.

Dailies in MoP

Draztal

I prefer dedicating, let's say, one day to grind one faction, by doing dungeon runs, grinding mobs, maybe doing some dailies, and then be off with it (for example I blasted from friendly to exalted with Skettis in less than 2 days)

Have you considered the sole fact you can't do that is one of the reasons you've got something to do for longer rather than be done with everything in a single day and the complain for the next 3 weeks there's nothing to do?

You're implying we should listen to all kinds of hyperboles. There's a BIG difference between feedback and hyperboles. If we based the feedback we passed to the devs on them (and for some reason our developers suddenly became individuals without any judgment capabilities) then the game would be in a real ugly place, to be honest.

It's fine if you don't like something. It's fine if you hate it with burning passion. It's not fine when you go on to ignore every other aspect of the game, reduce everything it offers to the absolute minimum, and then demand we act based on such a silly premise.

Can you honestly say you enjoy dailies? I sure as hell can't. Well, for a few days after I hit 90, they were refreshing and enjoyable. Thereafter they were a grind, a bore, an extremely poor design and a wasted effort.

I do. I enjoy them, I find them useful to do something outside my daily dungeon/raid routine. I've only stopped running them once I've hit exalted with all Pandaria factions to instead run scenarios, old raids and PVP.

Do you fear repute? Does your pride stop you from even attempting to admit that there's something even slightly wrong?

I'm noone to judge if there's something wrong with the amount of daily quests. I'm not a developer. I can understand, however, how a player might feel he's got to climb a huge mountain when you just reach level 90 and realize all the reputations you've got to go through.

But the thing is, now that all content is unlocked (unlike at MoP's launch), you can really progress at your leisure.

I'm sure many players, like myself, would be a lot more satisfied if we got a response that was understanding of our concerns and hatred for daily quests and acknowledged that we want an alternative.

There's plenty of alternative activities. The issue here, I fear, is that you want the rewards tied to daily quests without doing daily quests. I would like to have Heroic raiding gear rewards without doing Heroic raiding every day, but hey, I understand that wouldn't be healthy for the game.

Being an altoholic casual player my only complain about the dailies is that you have to them several times if you want to experience some casual end-game with a few alts.

Honest question: Isn't a better option for some casual end-game to run LFR with your alts? You'll get a shot at gear every week rather than having to go through those faction items.

Even if you are a paying customer they really dont care what you say about this topic, they think the solution to Cata problems are dailys times 25 a day.

Oh, please. The solution to Cataclysm problems, if you look at what's been added since then (4.0), is:-Pet Battles, Scenarios, Raid Finder, Daily quest reputations, Item Upgrades, The Tillers farm (and how you can use it for Cooking), Brawlers Guild, Black Market Auction House, World Bosses.

It's just not objective to go and argue that everything that's been added it's dailies.

And saying that LFR is so easy it is not when you need ilvl463 to get in the first one. so you need to do dailys to get gear that gets you up to the ilvl or ofc buy gear at 20-30k gold a piece.So just leave the topic.

LFR requires you to have ilvl460, which you can get by completing all the Dread Wastes quests, some Townlong Steppes rewards, and if you're still lacking gear for some reason: heroics/scenarios. You don't need to dailies to get in.

The problem with dailies is their structure. If you missed one set of dailies for whatever reason, then suddenly you're a behind. Your goal is a day further away from you and there's nothing you can do. This easily starts to mount up and it can eventually get to the point where you have missed so much rep that you just give in, because even though you're just seven days from exalted, you've still got to do the same old dailies that you've been doing for the past few months and it gets boring.

This isn't really true though. If you're 7 days away from reaching exalted, and you miss one day of dailies, you won't be at 8 days from exalted, you'll remain at 7. You're not losing anything. It's just up to you if you want to finish those 7 days in a single week, once every week, once every month...

Sure, I can see how people who had only one character would be bored by the Cataclysm model, contrary to people with many alts. But the MoP model of content is going way too much in the other direction, with alts being heavily discouraged by all the chores Blizz is pushing on us.

And it would really be to the good for the dialogue between fans and developers, if the Blizz reps here would stop being deliberately obtuse. "But you don't have to do all of this!" is not a valid comment in a game which relies so heavily on keeping players in the progression spiral ( with casuals like me being at the very low end of progression, but still feeling the need to make their character(s) better ).

When there's so much content to do with your main, do you truly need an army of alts at the same level your main is right now? at this very moment? I can't quite wrap my head around the argument of being a casual and at the same time arguing you need to have a bunch of alts at the very same level your main is.

No, we are not forced to do these dailies to be able to casually raid, however, it's damn hard to know that you have potential rewards within reach limited only by time-input, no actual effort aside from the time spent, and say 'Oh well, we got our behinds handed to us by this enrage, but it's ok, we're not as commited as those other guys doing dailies, so we'll just be content wiping since we don't have time (or even want) to do those daily quests.

Unless you're at your maximum skill level you're going to get a much bigger return from working on how well you play your character than picking a new item for him. Unless you're just massively undergeared (which you can fix by getting gear from an ample pool that is just not limited to dailies).

However, there are tons of things to discover in Mists if you go out and explore.The devs has places all sorts of cool and interesting treasures out in the world.I've had some great times just flying and riding around in Pandaria exploring.

Comments

Comment by Interest

Dailies are a terrible excuse for content or timesinks, as are arbritrary reputation grinds with out-dated in a month rewards.

The only exception to this was Isle of Quel'Danas.

Nothing else will suffice, no matter how hard you attempt to shove it up everyone's...throats or deny how tedious doing the same crap 25x a day on five characters is.

I dunno. I liked Ogri'la (darkrune farming FTW), Argent Tournament (yes surprisingly it that jousting was fun to do for me), and some others. I will admit it can get droll at times...and forcing people to do it is kind of lame too.

Comment by Kalyssa

on Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:04:22 -0600

UGLY new spirit beasts! There's so much they could have done (3 versions of a porcupine..really?). I take it none of the devs mains are hunters so they don't care. Pandaria spirit beasts should have been a completely unqiue model with better detail. I already deleted a pet in my stable because I was sure I would want the upcoming spirit beasts. My mistake

Comment by Minrath

on Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:30:08 -0600

im not impressed.If this were a good path for wow, so many servers horde and ally both wouldnt be dead already.best expansion ever? compared to what? sony's NGE? I myself am bored, tired and looking at other avenues to amuse myself, along with 596 members in my alliance guild and 440 Horde members in my horde guild.

2 hour que's for dps, 30-45 minutes for healers, raids non-existant, nothing even looks entertaining especially not working on one sole main knowing there isnt anyone to enchant gear, make leg mods, or any of that that isnt trying to charge 20k per.

Comment by exothermic1

on Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:37:07 -0600

ima get a blue one called sonic! , though i would prefer a spirit silkworm, you cant handle the spirit smoosh!

Comment by WizzardlordUK

on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:52:10 -0600

I think we all are...i think it would be cool if you could mount your pet